The sunlight laughed along the sea, and the young
corn was thick in the fields; leaves were beginning in the branches,
larks rose higher and higher, disappearing in the pale air, and, as we
approached the plantations, the amorous cawing of the rooks sounded
pleasantly in the ear. The appearance of death in the springtime, at
the moment when the world renews its life, touched my soul with that
anguish which the familiar spectacle has always and will never fail to
cause as long as a human heart beats beneath the heavens. And,
dropping behind the chattering crowd that in mourning-weed wended its
way through the sad spring landscape, I thought of her whom I had
loved so long and should never see again. I thought of memory as a
shrine where we can worship without shame, of friendship, and of the
pure escapement it offers us from our natural instincts; I remembered
that there is love other than that which the young man offers to her
he would take to wife, and I knew how much more intense and strangely
personal was my love of her than the love which that day I saw the
world offering to its creatures.
CHAPTER XI
BRING IN THE LAMP
For many days there has not been a wind in the trees, and the
landscape reminds me of a somnambulist--the same silence, the same
mystery, the same awe.
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